Summary of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason

Everest Media

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The place-names on the academic maps of philosophy tend to change. In the Middle Ages, for example, philosophy covered practically every branch of theoretical knowledge that did not come under theology.
#2 The history of philosophy is the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind. It is not a defined discipline, but rather a collection of different inquiries that have been adopted by other disciplines.
#3 The attempt to push rational inquiry to its limits is often bound to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems like a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration.
#4 The first philosophers were showmen who performed poetry and prose readings in public. They attracted passing audiences, devoted followers, and sometimes ridicule. The Presocratics invented the archetypes of all later philosophy.

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Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822500952
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The place-names on the academic maps of philosophy tend to change. In the Middle Ages, for example, philosophy covered practically every branch of theoretical knowledge that did not come under theology.

#2

The history of philosophy is the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind. It is not a defined discipline, but rather a collection of different inquiries that have been adopted by other disciplines.

#3

The attempt to push rational inquiry to its limits is often bound to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems like a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration.

#4

The first philosophers were showmen who performed poetry and prose readings in public. They attracted passing audiences, devoted followers, and sometimes ridicule. The Presocratics invented the archetypes of all later philosophy.

#5

The Presocratics were a group of Greek philosophers who lived between the eighth and fourth centuries BC. They were famous for their wisdom, but their writings have been shattered by time and only survive in small fragments.

#6

Thales was a well-traveled man who had learned about the cycle of eclipses in the past. He made a lucky guess that the moon would block the sun, which led to the solar eclipse that he predicted would occur in 585 BC.

#7

Thales was the first person to propose that the earth rests on water. He said this because it floated like wood and other similar substances, which are so constituted as to rest upon water but not upon air. His reasoning did not impress Aristotle, who pointed out that if the earth needs something to rest on, then so does the water which allegedly supports it.

#8

The Greeks appreciated intellectual order, and they liked to establish it wherever it seemed to be lacking. They wrote their history in a stately procession of teachers and pupils, each one passing the torch of knowledge to an appointed successor.

#9

Anaximander’s work demonstrated the urge to simplify and reduce observable phenomena. He postulated something invisible as the arche, or basic stuff, of the world. He believed that the best accounts of nature could not always rely on what was directly observable.

#10

Anaximander believed that everything in the universe was born out of an indeterminate and undifferentiated mass. The fundamental opposites were born together out of the indeterminate, and none of the battling substances had an unfair head start on its opponent.

#11

Anaximander’s story is that the earth is at the center of things, and that life on earth is the result of the same process of separating out that created the cosmos. The idea that living things can be generated spontaneously out of warm, moist matter was almost universal until the seventeenth century, when microscopes began to reveal a different story.

#12

Anaximander’s explanation for the arrival of man was that the first men were carried inside fishes, or fish-like creatures, which acted as surrogate mothers. He did not mean that one species, man, developed from another species, fish. He thought that the first men were nursed by fish and could look after themselves once they emerged on land.

#13

Anaximenes was a Greek philosopher who believed that the world was made of air. He believed that everything was made of air, and he even tried to explain how. He believed that the fundamental stuff of the world itself had the power to grow and change.

#14

Anaximenes believed that the world was made of air, and that the different elements were formed from different amounts of air. He used his new tools of condensation and rarefaction to explain the weather, but he ended up saying the same thing as Anaximander.

#15

The Milesians were the first philosophers to use reason to try and explain the world around them. They believed in a world governed by comprehensible law, and they used this faith to come up with good explanations of things such as life, eclipses, and thunder.

#16

The Milesians were the first people to believe that everything can be explained. They did not believe in the divinely mysterious on the one hand and the naturally explicable on the other. They believed that everything can be explained.

#17

The first philosophers were not necessarily atheistic. They were practical men who had little time for myths. They were also free-thinking when it came to religion, and they did not have very enthusiastic beliefs about the Olympian gods.

#18

The first philosophers in Greece were able to crystallize their beliefs and myths, and thus make them available for examination and criticism. This was a novel opportunity that was hard for pre-literate cultures to appreciate.

#19

Pythagoras was a famous Greek philosopher who believed in the transmigration of souls. He was said to have appeared in several places at once, and to have been reincarnated many times. His name is often used to describe the idea that things are similar but not identical.

#20

The life of Pythagoras is difficult to trace. He is said to have founded a religious cult, the Pythagoreans, which taught secret doctrines. However, most of what is known about him comes from the writings of his followers.

#21

Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century BC. He was the founder of the Pythagorean society, which was a group of ascetic sages who lived a very simple life. They were eventually driven out of Samos by its dissolute and tyrannical ruler, Polycrates.

#22

The Pythagoreans were a group of philosophers who believed in reincarnation and the importance of numbers. They were also interested in scientific and intellectual questions, but they also wallowed in the taboos, obscure sayings, and superstitious guides to life that made up the religious side of their curriculum.

#23

The religion of the Dionysian or Bacchic cults was based around the worship of Dionysus, who was the product of a twice-incestuous union between Zeus and Persephone. The worship of Dionysus involved the indulgence of sex, wine, violence, or any combination of the three.

#24

The Orphic theme of contrast between the defiled mortal body and the higher, purer knowledge attained through the soul is prevalent in Pythagorean accounts of inquiry.

#25

The Pythagoreans believed that by studying the heavenly bodies, they could acquire some of their desirable characteristics. Plato believed that the study of the ideal Forms, which earthly things are inferior copies of, gave one a sort of immortality.

#26

The Pythagoreans believed that the soul is weighed down by earthly concerns, and that if it remains unpurified, it will never escape from the realm of the body at death. They believed that the soul can be freed and able to ascend to the immortal and immaterial realm if it follows the right program of purification.

#27

The Pythagoreans were the first people to discover the connection between the pitch of a musical note and the rate of vibration of air. They believed that numbers were the principles of all things, and that nature was fundamentally mathematical.

#28

The last part of the Pythagoreans’ general philosophical doctrine is the one that deals with the ultimate origins and principles of the universe. They believed that numbers were constituents of all things, but they did not believe that numbers were the ultimate constituents. They believed that something else was the ultimate constituent.

#29

The idea behind the saying that all things that are said to be consist of a one and a many is that order and beauty are created when some form of limit is imposed on the unlimited raw material of the universe.

#30

The Pythagoreans were a group of philosophers who were famous for their studies of nature, particularly astronomy, mathematics, and music. They were not supermen who with one bound leapt free of the more primitive ideas of their predecessors.

#31

The original Pythagorean theory was that the heavenly bodies make sounds because they hurtle through space at various speeds. The ratios between these different speeds are just the right ones to ensure that the sounds are harmonious. We do not hear this music because we are mortal, but we have heard it since birth and so are used to it.

#32

The first man to make a serious attempt to apply mathematics to find laws of celestial motion was Johannes Kepler, a confirmed Pythagorean. His faith that the heavens must be arranged in a harmonious pattern led him to formulate several generalizations about the planets.

#33

The most influential person in the history of mathematics, according to Russell, was Pythagoras. He was the first to develop rigorous mathematical proofs and demonstrations, rather than just miscellaneous observations about numbers and triangles.

#34

The idea that mathematics provides knowledge about a realm of perfect objects that is somehow superior to what we learn through our senses about the jagged and imperfect physical world is attributed to Pythagoras.

#35

The traditional image of the philosopher as absent-minded professor goes back to Thales, and was exemplified by Heraclitus, who was unlike anyone who had come before him. He was haughty and disdainful of other people, which may explain his inaccessible style.

#36

Heraclitus was the first philosopher to examine himself and his own thoughts, and he believed that the same principles governed man and nature. He believed that the universe had always existed, and that it grew out of one sort of stuff at a particular moment of creation.

#37

Heraclitus believed that everything is in a state of flux, and that opposites are really th